Word: floundering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even as the negotiations for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel appeared to flounder in Washington, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee last week announced in Oslo that this year's award would go jointly to Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin. Few Western observers would quarrel with the selection of Sadat, whose courageous mission to Jerusalem last November had set the stage for the tumultuous peace drive that followed. But in its attempt at even-handedness in naming Begin to share the honor and the $173,700 in prize money, the committee (see box) made...
...SUBMERGENCE of identity, its apparent destruction, and its final reassertion will remain, for most of us, abstract concepts to mull over at our will and convenience. As we flounder from crisis to crisis during our youth, many of us imagine ourselves trapped by the self-images we have built up; we then seek physical escape, metamorphosis, new friends and intimates--anything, in short, that promises freedom from this internalized jail cell. But we often lose sight of one fundamental truth behind this search for personal redefinition--that it is a process we enter into on a voluntary basis, often...
...FLOUNDER...
...comes The Flounder, a long, magnificent passage of wind, a pungent humanizing of the past and present in which the Weltgeist (world spirit) is a talking fish, a warty, cunning creature with a crooked mouth and two freakish eyes on one side of its doormat body. This turbot, as it is called on the Continent, is also a male chauvinist who echoes one of the two main themes of the book: the eternal power struggle between men and women. The other persistent melody, the importance of cooking and nutrition in history, is in the tasty flesh of the flounder itself...
...beginning is prehistoric. Grass's fisherman and his fellows live in a matriarchy, cared for and suckled by the three-breasted Awa. In this age before Prometheus, women have stolen fire from the gods and rule through the cooking pot. But the Flounder, "like a swimming newspaper," gives man the crucial information that begins male domination: fire can also be used to smelt metal from rock, and metal can be forged into spearheads and axes. Thus is born man's wanderlust, his will to strive and conquer, his ability to make myths and reason to tragic absurdities...